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After Yucca

The country has repeatedly tried and failed to find a burial spot for spent nuclear fuel rods that will remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. The rods are currently stored in cooling pools or dry casks at nuclear power plants across the country. But that is becoming politically untenable. Nine states have already banned the construction of new reactors until the waste problem is solved or substantial progress made.

Now a blue ribbon commission appointed by President Obama has come up with some sensible recommendations for what is primarily a political problem. Instead of trying to dictate a final storage site from Washington, it recommends a “consent-based approach” in which federal officials would identify areas with suitable geology and, if necessary, offer financial incentives to encourage states and localities to volunteer to accept the waste.

In 1987, Congress designated Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the sole site for a repository. Nevada wasn’t the only state with potentially suitable geology, but it had less clout in Congress. For two decades, the state government managed to slow the project with legal and technical objections, and once Senator Harry Reid of Nevada became the majority leader, he found ways to stop it indefinitely. During the 2008 campaign, President Obama sought to curry favor with Nevada voters by pledging to shut down the Yucca project altogether.

We believe that the technology exists to isolate the fuel and protect residents. But we also understand why people would be nervous. Whether any incentives will overcome those fears is unclear. Consent and the lure of jobs has worked in several European countries and in finding a site for military wastes in New Mexico.

The commission also called for the creation of one or more interim surface storage sites to accept used fuel rods from the 10 nuclear reactors that have ceased operating and possibly other plants. It would be cheaper to guard and easier to inspect than the shuttered plants. But it will be important to make sure that, once such sites exist, they don’t give politicians an excuse to stop looking for underground sites for more permanent storage.

A version of this editorial appears in print on February 16, 2012, on Page A30 of the New York edition with the headline: After Yucca. Today's Paper|Subscribe